I've been covering the business of news, information and entertainment in one form or another for more than 10 years. In February 2014, I moved to San Francisco to cover the tech beat. My primary focus is social media and digital media, but I'm interested in other aspects, including but not limited to the sharing economy, lifehacking, fitness & sports tech and the evolving culture of the Bay Area. In past incarnations I've worked at AOL, Conde Nast Portfolio, Radar and WWD. Circle me on Google+, follow me on Twitter or send me tips or ideas at jbercovici@forbes.com.

CNN Overhauls Its Digital Presence For The Mobile Era

In the last 10 years, CNN has been the Changeable News Network, with four different presidents and lord knows how many different iterations of its primetime lineup. On the web side, though, it’s been a story of tremendous stability — to a fault.

The Time WarnerTime Warner-owned channel is in the midst of a major overhaul of its entire digital platform, its first in more than a decade. “For a long time, we looked at this as a television network with a really large website attached,” says K.C. Estenson, CNN’s general manager for digital.

But with television and the web collapsing into one mega-medium — a convergence that’s likely to accelerate with this week’s news that SonySony has reached a deal to stream ViacomViacom cable channels over its game consoles — a new set of priorities was needed, says Jeff Zucker, who took over as president of CNN a year ago.

“We are not going to care in the long run where people are getting their news and information from, as long as it’s CNN,” Zucker says.

The good news is that, despite the relative inattention, CNN is still one of the top news destinations online — the biggest after YahooYahoo/ABC News and AOLAOL/Huffington Post. The bad news is, or was, that CNN’s digital publishing platform was built for the internet as it existed 10 years ago, when basically everyone experienced it on desktop computers and there was no such thing as social media.

While CNN is a clear No. 1 in mobile traffic among news sites, and while its mobile (up 46% versus 2012) and tablet (up 70%) growth have far outpaced its flattish desktop consumption, the publishing system was still desktop-centric, with content being published first to the desktop site and then pushed, clumsily and with lots of manual coding, to its mobile formats.

Over the next three months, all that will change. The new platform, in limited beta now but due to be rolled out worldwide by November, is completely dynamic, with one content stream that automatically reoptimizes to whichever screen it’s being viewed on. When it’s all done, CNN.com will be the biggest website in the world published dynamically, says Estenson.

“The idea is for there to be a consistency of experience for CNN regardless of which device you come in on,” says Estenson. He and Zucker use the term “closest screen available” to describe their new thinking.

The rebuild also offered an opportunity to refresh the brand’s digital look and feel in numerous smaller ways that users might not consciously notice but that could have a big effect on how they perceive it. Those include a different color palette. The old site made way too much use of CNN’s signature red hue, says Estenson. The new one will have a palette that shifts depending on the tenor of the news you’re viewing, with lighter and softer stories marked by earth or gem tones and red reserved for the most serious matters. “You can think of it almost as a mood ring,” says Estenson.

The new design will also offer ways to follow individual CNN personalities (not unlike the contributor pages we have at FORBES) and news topics.

“The grand vision,” says Estenson, “is at some point we can start to dynamically publish the site for each individual.”

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